It’s the birthday of the bestselling English author Thomas Ridley Sharpe (1928-2013), a comic novelist said to be in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. One critic even likened him to “P.G. Wodehouse on acid” (Stanley Reynolds, “Tom Sharpe Obituary,” June 6, 2013, The Guardian); his novels are outrageous and bawdy in the [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Judith Guest, whose 1976 novel Ordinary People was made into a movie that won four Academy awards in 1981. Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936, grew up there, and got her B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in 1958. After college she got married, [...]
It’s the birthday of historian and journalist Iris Chang (1968-2004), best known as the author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), an account that threw international attention on a massacre that had been largely ignored for decades. Chang’s grandparents had escaped Nanking before the massacre, so Chang grew [...]
It’s the birthday of Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), who began writing at a time when Latino writers were getting zero attention in the U.S. but whose debut novel more than 20 years later, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, was a huge success. Alvarez was born in New York City but spent her first [...]
It’s the birthday of roughly a bazillion authors, poets, and playwrights, including A.E. Housman, Robert Frost, Joseph Campbell, Tennessee Williams, Erica Jong, and Elizabeth Jane Howard. (Sometimes there is just nobody, and sometimes they all clump up.) Hilary Mantel, author of the stunning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, thinks very highly of [...]
It’s the birthday of Flannery O’Connor (b. 1925), one of the greatest American fiction writers and a master of the short story form. As both a Southern Gothic writer and a devout Roman Catholic, her work is noted for containing acts of brutality and violence that serve to strip characters of their illusions and self-centeredness, [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and nonfiction author Winston Groom (b. 1944), best known as the author of Forrest Gump. Groom was a would-be writer who felt he had nothing to write about until he served in Vietnam. Groom was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Mobile County, Alabama. He intended to become [...]
It’s the birthday of the immensely popular poet Billy Collins (b. 1941), loved for the openness, intelligence, and wit of his poems. The critic John Taylor said this about Collins: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered [...]
It’s the birthday of internationally acclaimed children’s book author Margaret Mahy, born in 1936 in Whakatane, New Zealand. Mahy wrote over 150 books, from picture books like The Lion in the Meadow (1969) to young adult novels like The Haunting (1982), which won Mahy the coveted Carnegie Medal—the first time the Carnegie was awarded to [...]
It’s the birthday of the Roman poet Ovid (b. 43 BCE), who wrote Metamorphoses, and the birthday of the noted Australian poet and novelist David Malouf, born 1,977 years later, who wrote An Imaginary Life, a novel about the final years of Ovid’s life, spent in exile. What are the odds? Ovid was born in [...]
It’s the birthday of Philip Roth, born in 1933 and still kicking, whose reputation as the “great American novelist” is perhaps unparalleled. He has written over 30 books of fiction, the majority of them novels, and is known for his exploration of Jewish themes and of “the tension between license and restraint,… a struggle between [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the most important poets of the past century, Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892 – 1938). While relatively unknown during his lifetime, today he is revered for his radical innovations and for the way his “wrenched syntax” so immediately expresses human suffering. Vallejo was the youngest of 11 children, born [...]